Hotel room attendants' delivery of quality service

Author

Kensbock, Sandra L, Patiar, Anoop, Jennings, Gayle

Published

2019

Journal Title

Tourism and Hospitality Research

Version

Accepted Manuscript (AM)

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/1467358417751023

Copyright Statement

Sandra L Kensbock, Anoop Patiar and Gayle Jennings, Hotel room attendants’ delivery ofquality service, Tourism and Hospitality Research, pp. 1–12, 2017. Copyright 2017 The Authors.Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.

Downloaded from

http://hdl.handle.net/10072/370177

Griffith Research Online

https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au

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‘HOTEL ROOM ATTENDANTS’ DELIVERY OF QUALITY SERVICE’

Sandra Kensbock, PhD

Affiliation: Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management, Griffith University,

Brisbane.

Telephone: (61 7) 373 56710

Facsimile: (61 7) 373 56743

Griffith Location: Glyn Davis Building (N72) 0.37, 170 Kessels Road, Nathan, QLD, 4111

Postal Address: Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management, Nathan campus,

Griffith University, 170 Kessels Road QLD 4111, Australia

Email Address: s.kensbock@griffith.edu.au

Anoop Patiar, PhD

Affiliation: Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management, Griffith University,

Brisbane.

Telephone: (61 7) 373 54104

Facsimile: (61 7) 373 56743

Griffith Location: (N72) 0.31, Nathan campus, Griffith University, 170 Kessels Road,

Nathan, QLD, 4111

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Postal Address: Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management, Nathan campus,

Nathan, Griffith University, QLD 4111, Australia

Email Address: a.patiar@griffith.edu.au

Gayle Jennings, PhD

Affiliations: Imagine Consulting Group International, Brisbane, Australia and Department of

Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management, Griffith University, Brisbane.

Postal Address: GPO Box 2843, Brisbane 4001, Australia

Email Address: gayle@imaginecgi.com

Hotel room attendants’ delivery of quality service

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Abstract

Illuminating the physical difficulties experienced by hotel room attendants in delivering

service quality at 5-star hotels on the Gold Coast region of South East Queensland, Australia,

our research was founded on socialist-feminist and critical-theory epistemologies. In-depth

interviews were conducted with a sample of 46 hotel room attendants. We used a qualitative,

social-constructivist, grounded-theory methodology to render the empirical material into a

basic social structural process of tasking. Tasking offers a conceptual framework of room

attendants’ daily employment experiences as they transform hotel rooms to prescribed

standards. Tasking illustrates the high physical demands placed on room attendants,

tantamount to exploitation from their own perspectives. Tasking contributes to research on

employment experiences in hospitality, particularly on hotel praxis, delivery of quality

customer service and the operational demands placed on room attendants. This paper presents

the results of the first in-depth examination of the daily functions and roles of hotel room

attendants.

Keywords: Exploitation Hotel Room Attendants Service Quality Grounded Theory

Hotel praxis

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I’m the one that cleans and tidies the rooms when the guest is not there. I make it so

when the guest comes in it looks great, first impressions are really important, so you

have to make sure that fine details are done.

(Maureen, Hotel Room Attendant).

Introduction

Within the hospitality industry, ‘service quality’ is espoused as a point of differentiation

amongst competitors; and plays a critical role in improving operational efficiency, as well as

generating improved profitability (Ali, Hussain & Ryu, 2017). Subsequently, service quality

is recognized as an important issue for business performance, one that service-based

organizations, such as hotels, need to intricately understand and effectively manage (Kapiki,

2012). Service quality in hotels is, specifically, related to the service process (e.g. speed of

service) and functional quality (e.g. a hygienically clean bathroom). Consequently, the work

of room attendants is a source upon which to build further service differentiation and

competitiveness. Relatedly, psychological and behavioral aspects of how well employees

perform their tasks also contribute to overall service quality (Caruana, 2002). Service quality

within the hospitality sector can be frequently misunderstood due to the multi-dimensional

nature of the concept, its varying applications, and the range of models used for measurement

(Pizam, Shapoval & Ellis, 2016). Given the importance of service quality with regard to

guests’ satisfaction and hotel profitability, extant literature related to the role of room

attendants in delivering service quality is limited (Grobelna & Marchiszewska, 2013). In this

paper, we redress this gap in the literature.

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Housekeeping is the second largest occupation in hotels, comprising 26 per cent of hotel

employees (Scherzer, Ruguilies & Krause, 2005). While many studies identify the

physiological and psychological stressors endured by hotel room attendants, only a limited

number of studies, dating from the 1970s to the present, take a holistic consideration of room

attendants’ role in hotels. (See Boon, 2007; Hunter Powell & Watson, 2006; Kensbock,

Jennings, Bailey & Patiar, 2016; Knox, 2006; Liladrie, 2010; Onsøyen, Myukletun & Steiro,

2009; Oxenbridge & Lindegaard Moensted, 2011; Saunders & Pullen, 1987; Shamir, 1975;

Sherman, 2011; Sollund, 2006). Without exception, all of these studies reported the servicing

of hotel bedrooms as a predominantly female occupation involving heavy workloads; yet

none defined the concept-heavy workload, or its implications for room attendants. In

addition, the studies identified the servicing of hotel bedrooms as associated with low

workplace status, relatively low pay, with high labour turnover and little opportunity for

advancement. A significant point to note is that despite the passage of time and literature, as

well as co-varying national contexts and differing management styles, little has changed in

room attendants’ working conditions. Hotel room attendants continue to be exposed to two

main elements of occupational hazards: physical exertion resulting from heavy workloads

and continuous hard work; and exposure to chemicals and biological pathogens. As this

research will show, these elements serve to negatively affect the delivery of service quality

within participating hotels. Moreover, in our research, in order to achieve service quality,

room attendants’ employment experiences involving heavy workloads were conceptualized

as a form of exploitation. Specifically, in this article, the concept of exploitation is taken to

mean taking advantage of someone in a way that is unfair (Zwolinski, 2012).

The purpose of our research was to give ‘voice’ to room attendants, privileging them as the

experts in the field. Our research makes the following contributions: First, we identify hotel

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room attendants’ onerous workload, highlighting how issues negatively impact on the

delivery of quality service. Second, we present the narratives of the women and the

interpretation of their employment stories to provide in-depth emic understanding of the role

of women room attendants within the study hotels and the perceived exploitative nature of

their work.

The following sections of this paper present a background of extant literature related to

service quality. We then provide details of the epistemological foundations guiding our

grounded theory methodology. The outcomes of this research are described by presenting the

grounded theory of ‘tasking’ as a basic social structural process depicting the impacts of

workload on quality service delivery within five star hotels. Finally, we analyse the outcomes

by discussing how women room attendants struggle to provide service quality given the

onerous workloads imposed on them. This detailed examination of provision of service

quality and delineation of the heavy workload of room attendants are the unique contributions

of this research.

Service quality

A plethora of literature contributes to our understanding of service quality, and is often linked

to quantitative measurement of customer satisfaction. Within the hospitality industry, guest

satisfaction may be considered the “degree to which a product or service meets the

customer’s expectations” (Pizam & Holcomb, 2008, p.66), and more recently to ‘delight’

customers (Barnes, Ponder & Dugar, 2011). Much research has been devoted to the

mechanics of matching guest expectations with experiences of quality and linking

7

expectations to guest satisfaction (Lai & Hitchcock, 2017). The following discussion

provides an overview of the service quality measurement tools currently in use within service

industries, such as hospitality.

The concept of service quality is well embedded in extant quality literature. Examples of this

embeddedness are reflected in the ISO 9000 standard, which was developed and published by

the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to define, establish and maintain

effective quality assurance systems for service industries. However, it should be noted that

the ISO 9000 is primarily concerned with business processes rather than client satisfaction

outcomes. Albeit, it does provide an assurance of quality to its customers. Another example,

is Total Quality Management (TQM), which offers a holistic approach to quality

management. TQM espouses zero defects, and emphasizes quality initiatives to ensure

continuous improvements, and product innovation as a primary management business

strategy to achieve a competitive advantage (Eraqi, 2006). The TQM approach is frequently

applied within tourism and hospitality industries, as it is a people-focused management

system that aims at continually increasing customer satisfaction (Kapiki, 2012). Earlier, the

use of Quality Indicators (QI) was highlighted by Rosen (1974). The QI measurement

approach classifies characteristics, such as room services, catering services, reception

services, lounge and other communal areas services and then measures these in terms of the

quality perceived by the client. Recently, Quality Function Deployment (QFD) advocates the

mechanics of a service context in three phases, namely service planning, process control

characteristics and action plans while linking the voice of the customer with service

management requirements, yet defusing the customers’ expectations in the service

development process (see Bahar Kurtulmuşoğlu & Pakdil, 2017 for a current analysis of QFD

process).

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The SERVQUAL scale has become the most recognized approach to measuring service

quality (Patiar et al., 2012). Originally developed by Parasuraman et al., (1985), SERVQUAL

was later revised by the original authors and reduced to a five component structure

encompassing: Tangibles; Reliability; Responsiveness; Assurance; and Empathy. A

SERVQUAL derivative, LODGQUAL attempted to better focus on the service and product

measurements situated within the hospitality industry (Getty & Thompson, 1995). A further

related lodging and quality model was the Lodging Quality Index (LQI), developed by Getty

and Getty (2003). The LQI uses a pool of 26 items representing five dimensions of tangibility

or functionality, reliability of reservation and room readiness; ‘responsiveness’ in the

willingness of staff to respond; ‘confidence’ of a safe environment with respect and

politeness, and ‘good listening’ and communication skills of staff (Grobelna &

Marciszewska, 2013). An additional variation of SERVQUAL has emerged in the form of

SERVPERF, which attributes service quality to attitudes based on satisfaction (Eraqi, 2011).

Both SERVPERF and SERVQUAL identify the need for tangibility and reliability and

empathy, which are provided by room attendants in the hotel context.

Service quality within the hospitality industry is inextricably linked to customer satisfaction

and retention, and subsequently to overall business success (Arvelo-Pérez, Arbelo & Pérez-

Gómez, 2017). Lewis and McCann (2004) identify lack of cleanliness as the most important

factor in guest perception of service failure, with responsiveness and tangibles as the most

significant dimension of quality service. This paper identifies the difficulty hotel room

attendants’ face in the delivery of two key dimensions of service quality: tangibility, and

reliability from their perspective, due to their intense workload and the time pressures under

which they work. The grounded theory methodology we followed is now explained.

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Methodology

Our research was concerned with the workload of women employed as hotel room attendants

and how this impacts the delivery of service quality. We used a qualitative research method,

in order to obtain meaningful detailed descriptions and explanations of complex real world

experiences and meanings (Jennings, 2001), with respect to hotel room attendants. Our

research was founded on an ‘intertwined epistemology’ incorporating theoretical paradigms

of socialist feminism and critical theory. Respectively, a socialist feminist epistemology

asserts the norms and practices of knowledge production affect the lives of women

(Buchanan, 2011), while a critical theory orientation seeks to liberate people from enslaving

circumstances (Horkheimer, 1974). These epistemological influences permeated our research

process, underpinned by the view that all knowledge is socially constructed, evolving and

situated. As critical theorists we included an axiological aim to advance transformational

changes (Jennings, 2001) in room attendants’ employment circumstances. We found the

majority of studies conducted into service quality drew on post-positivist epistemologies. As

the experience of quality is inherently personal, an emic - insider perspective (Jennings et al.,

2009) based research design was adopted. This adoption aimed to capture the multiple

meanings associated with the quality of hotel room hospitality experiences from the

perspectives of room attendants. As noted by Jennings and Weiler (2006, p.304), “in order to

understand experiences, industry and researchers need to interact with the stakeholders”.

Room attendants, as providers of service quality, are therefore one of the major stakeholders

within five star hotels.

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Based on above arguments, we chose a ‘purposive’ (or highly selective) theoretical sampling

of room attendants working at five-star hotels on the Gold Coast of south-east Queensland,

Australia. The five participating hotels ranged in size from 243 rooms to 593 rooms and

were comparable in terms of their market mix, location, and 5-star ratings with three

belonging to international chains. Making initial access involved approval of several

hierarchical levels of gatekeepers within the hotels (i.e., general managers, human resource

managers and executive housekeepers). One-on-one, in-depth interviews were conducted

with 46 women room attendants. Interviews were semi-structured in nature and focussed on

the themes related to the daily experiences of room attendants. Participants ranged in ages

from mid-20s to early-60s and were from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Each participant

provided informed consent and was assured of their confidentiality. The length of interviews

averaged 30 minutes and these were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The empirical

material was interpreted using grounded theory methodological tools. First open coding was

used, followed by selective coding. Grounded theory offers a sound method for empirical

material (data) collection and interpretation (analysis) to encompass pro-activity rather than

reactivity (Jennings et al., 2009). In addition, grounded theory’s methodological toolkit offers

flexibility in inductive construction of categories to explain social phenomenon, in this

research, the room attendants’ delivery of service quality.

The interviews were conducted in groups, interspersed with coding. We applied Glaser’s

(1978) Theoretical sensitivity to derive the theoretical codes to express the interrelationships

between the substantive codes arising from selective coding processes. The outcome of our

interpretations was a conceptualization of tasking as a basic social structural process that

encompassed the causal properties of physical tasks a room attendant performs on a daily

basis to transform a hotel room into a ‘five-star’ quality commercial commodity. These tasks

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include making the bed, manoeuvring the trolley and cleaning the bathroom. Intervening

conditions are coalesced around the physical demands and time constraints room attendants

are placed under and how these conditions impact the consequences of service quality

delivery. The hallmark of qualitative research is groundedness and goodness of fit with those

whom are participating in the study (Charmaz, 2006). The findings of this study were

grounded with the room attendant participants, and were found to be a good fit with their

lived work experiences. The following section presents tasking as a basic structural social

process that room attendants undergo to fulfil their roles within hotels. In doing so, as

intimated previously, we provide ‘voice’ for the room attendants and narrate their views of

the physical duties that they are required to complete. Where verbatim quotes are used,

pseudonyms are applied.

Findings

Tasking

‘Tasking’ as a “substantive theory” (Adelman, 2010) forms a basic social structural process,

of being a room attendant in a five-star hotel. Tasking incorporates the major categories of

hard work; including moving the housekeeping trolley, bed-making and bathroom cleaning;

as well as meeting time pressures and paying attention to finer details in order to meet five-

star service quality standards. The model of tasking is shown in Figure 1.

Insert Figure 1 about here

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In line with our epistemological position of privileging room attendants as the experts, each

of the categories and their properties is represented through the use of verbatim quotes from

room attendant interviews. There were also intervening conditions that further intensified the

hard work, such as room layout, the functionality of cleaning equipment, and the behavior of

some guests. The hard working conditions were accompanied by what attendants reported as

an inequitable reward of low wages. Helen, in her 50s, expressed her opinion:

It’s not fair, the pay is just the pits for the hard work you do.

Hotels choose cost-minimization business strategies, which may be unsustainable, “… it

makes no sense to prop up indefinitely firms whose very existence depends on paying poor

wages” (Lloyd, Warhurst & Dutton, 2013, p.268). For example, the minimum legal rate of

pay in Australia has become the ‘going rate’, and is representative of exploitation. Within the

context of our research, the assumption that five-star hotels cannot afford to pay more needs

to be reconsidered, particularly given the workload of room attendants as detailed below.

Hard Work

In the daily routine of hotel operations, the core concern of participating room attendants was

the physical demands of hard work, requiring constant physical exertion, with recognized

potential for causing physical injury. Alison, in her 30s, questioned current hotel

expectations:

I can’t understand why they push so hard, why is this industry so demanding? And the

physical pain is hard, girls are getting hurt.

In hotels, organizational commitment, productivity and job satisfaction are affected by

occupational health and safety risk factors. Fatigue from exploitative hard work, such as

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identified in tasking, increases aging and diminishes the quality of work life of employees

(Kiliç & Selim, 2009). Further, fatigue can increase the risk of physical accidents and a

possibility of missing some important aspects of service delivery, particularly reliability. Our

research details the most physically challenging tasks identified by room attendants as bed-

making, manoeuvring the supply trolley and bathroom cleaning.

Bed-Making

The bed, usually of king size, was recognized by room attendants as being the primary

element of ‘five-star’ presentation to guests when they entered the hotel room, and making

beds was the most physically challenging and time consuming activity. Kirsten, in her 50s,

emphasized the importance of the bed as a finished hotel product, which sets the guest room

scene:

When a guest walks into a room, most guests look at the bed, if the guests come in

there and see the bed nice and if there’s a little mistake that you might have forgot,

they won’t worry about that because it’s nice and fresh looking.

While the number of beds a room attendant made varied daily with room allocations, most

reported having to make between 26 and 32 beds in a day. The process of making a bed

involves changing the linen daily with many movements back and forth around the bed,

adding and tucking-in layers of linen and replacing up to six pillowcases. These bedding

layers also require lifting the edges of the mattresses, (many are heavy, super king-sized

mattresses), at least once all the way around. Room attendants also have to move the beds to

check for lost property; to realign the base and mattress; and to restore the bed to the required

position. The task of making beds, day after day, compounds into an enormous weekly and

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monthly physical toll of exploitation on these women. The room attendants identified the

activity of bed-making as a leading contributor to their fatigue and injuries.

Bed-making involves muscular and skeletal demands through stretching of arms and quick

limb motions and requires awkward postures, physical exertion and repetitive movements of

twisting and forward bending. Room attendants are exposed to compression forces in the bed-

making task, which exceed prescribed Australian ‘safe lifting’ limits (Milburn & Barrett,

1999). Historically and recently, literature, identifies room attendants’ health status as worse

than the general population (Larkin, 1969; Seifert & Messing, 2006). Such occupational

accidents incur losses both for the hospitality sector and for the economy of a country (Kiliç

& Selim, 2009). As a consequence, room attendants felt they were exploited in their efforts to

reach assurance of room readiness.

The expectations of participating five-star hotels can only be described as ‘exploitative’

because the hard physical efforts of room attendants’ labour was, and continues to be,

appropriated to benefit hotel owners. In line with our theoretical philosophical position as

socialist feminists and critical theorists, we use related philosophical-positioning vocabulary.

Consequently, our use of the term ‘exploitation’ is a moral or ethical choice and mirrors the

“goodness of fit” of our understanding or interpretation of the situation room attendants

experience in their daily working lives. We realize that we use an a priori principle of value

in our assumptions. We view the current working conditions for room attendants as unfair

and unjust.

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The Housekeeping Trolley

After bed-making, the second most physically challenging task for room attendants was

manoeuvring the housekeeping trolley. Room attendants were required to push a fully loaded

housekeeping trolley from the location of the housekeeping department into lifts, along

carpeted corridors and between rooms. These trolleys weigh over 70kg when empty (scif.com

2010). Rachael, in her 40s, describes what can happen:

The trolleys are pretty heavy, we have got some little girls [room attendants] and I’ve

seen them struggling, they are just about horizontal trying to move them and get them

up the corridor.

The trolley is meant to visually enhance the corridor experience for the guests’ gaze by

keeping the cleaning equipment tidy or concealed. By the end of the day, these trolleys were

overloaded with wet towels and soiled bed linen, which increased the force required to push

them around. Stocking the trolley and manoeuvring it between hotel rooms on different floors

takes time that is often not included in the 30 minutes allocated for each room’s service. The

housekeeping trolley also provided the cleaning equipment for the third identified major

physical challenge, the bathroom.

The Bathroom

Room attendants viewed bathroom cleaning as their most important task performed in the

guest room. Miranda, in her 50s, clearly stated that the bathroom task was a key quality

performance indicator for the guest:

Hygiene is what we are employed for and that is what the guest expects. The

bathroom is important, the hygiene side of it.

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To achieve a hygienically and aesthetically clean bathroom, repetitive broad arm movements

are needed to wipe walls and shower screens, along with working on knees to clean the bath

and shower floors. Many participating room attendants reported elbow, wrist, neck, shoulder

and back strain injuries caused by bathroom cleaning. Janice, in her 20s, identified a

condition that several other room attendants described:

I have what is called ‘golfers elbow’, it’s on the opposite side of the elbow from tennis

elbow, it’s on the bottom and caused by repetitive scrubbing all the time, there’s

always someone [here] on WorkCover [A compensation scheme for employees who

suffer workplace injuries].

Many room attendants reported working with pain on a daily basis, and also found cleaning

bathrooms a repulsive and dirty challenge. Most room attendants expressed fears of

contracting diseases, particularly from cleaning toilets. Ivy, in her 40s, identified potential

threats:

Cleaning toilets is the worst, I’m always scared of splashes and flicks of water in my

face.

Apart from exposure to pathogens in bathrooms, further occupational risks to which room

attendants were exposed included the chemicals used for cleaning. There appeared to be little

consultation with room attendants by the hotel management decision-makers about the

cleaning products used. This marginalizes them as a community of value, who have in-depth

knowledge of their tasking, as reported by Glenda, in her 50s:

It’s the finance department who decides what product we use, and they just choose the

cheapest with no idea whether it works or not.

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We use ‘marginalization’ to denote room attendants’ exclusion from organizational decision-

making. Inability to acquire the best and safest cleaning products is a service failure at the

soul of the hotel showing a lack of standards regarding tangible service quality (Li & Krit,

2012). Room attendants are exposed to various dangerous chemicals used for cleaning (Lalla

& Dingle, 2004), as well as to pathogenic bacteria as they undertake cleaning tasks.

Corrosive cleaning agents used by hotels have been found to trigger high rates of lung

damage, and to induce adverse neurological, immunological, endocrine and physiological

reactions, with potential negative links to central nervous system tolerance (Caress,

Steinemann & Waddick, 2002). Additionally, organophosphates, which are the basis of many

insecticides used to control bed bugs, have been linked to an increased risk of dementia in

later life (Hayden et al., 2010). Both the hard and hazardous work of bed-making and

bathroom cleaning was exacerbated by intervening conditions, such as guests’ late departures

delaying access to rooms, along with the messy state of some vacated rooms. These

workloads made it very difficult to service or clean a room in the allocated time as well as to

meet assurance and reliability of quality.

Messy Rooms

The messy condition of some hotel rooms was identified as demoralizing for room attendants.

An untidy and dirty room takes longer to clean and increased time pressures on room

attendants, as Rebecca, in her 50s, asserted:

The state of some of the rooms, the guests don’t seem to have any respect for us.

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Room attendants were in consensus that family groups required much more physical effort,

particularly as there was often a roll-out bed installed in the room which made access

difficult. Helen, in her 50s, explained:

We have family rooms that are all the same size with a king bed in one room and two

queens in the other, but they cram five and sometimes six people in them with a

rollout bed as well, and it makes it really hard to clean the rooms, and then the kids’

toys are everywhere.

A consequence of crowded rooms and young guests was that the room attendants needed

longer time in these rooms to negotiate the extra furniture, which also constituted an

occupational health and safety hazard. Other guests whose behavior caused delays due to the

state of vacated rooms were male sports teams who often celebrated the end of their playing

season on the Gold Coast. These teams were identified as particularly problematic. Kate, in

her 50s, explained what she considered the worst task, reflecting an often-stated view by

room attendants generally:

Oh picking up used Frenchies [condoms] that’s disgusting, they are lying on the floor,

we use gloves but it is not nice.

As room attendants enter the personal space of the guest, they can also witness intimate

actions (sleep and self-cleaning). They are also exposed to offensive odours as Gwen, in her

40s, explained:

One thing I don’t like is the body odour in some rooms, but the worst part is cleaning

up people’s spew [vomit].

There appears no provision of extra financial rewards for the room attendants who actually

undertake these more ‘dirty’ tasks, although in some hotels their workload might be reduced,

19

subject to the availability of other staff. By not considering delaying incidents, such as the

particularly messy rooms of certain guests, hotel management are taking advantage, or

exploit, room attendants by failing to recognize these difficulties or compensate them for

their additional efforts of hard and dirty work.

Hard work

The meaning and consequences of ‘hard work’ identified by room-attendants were women

who were physically and mentally drained and demoralized workers. Valerie, in her 50s,

encapsulated this as she explained her feelings at the end of the day:

We sit in here [locker room] exhausted, you can only do so many rooms.

Hotel room attendants who participated in this study reported giving full commitment to their

performance of tasking each day. The physical demands of being a room attendant were

believed to be a major cause of high staff turnover experienced at most establishments, as

Valerie argued:

The room attendants are exhausted so they have a high staff turnover. There are a few

that stay 10 or 12 years, but the majority of it is a turnover of six to eight months.

Room attendants believed that high staff turnover and high absenteeism were consequences

of the demands of the hard work of tasking. The physical tasks of bed-making, trolley

pushing and bathroom cleaning capture the majority of experiences associated with the

descriptor ‘hard work’. Inherent in this hard work, is the exploitation of room attendants

through overwork and injury risk, without recognition or fair recompense for encountering

these risks. It is believed that poor internal service to employees leads to poor treatment of

guests and this in turn affects delivery of service quality (Grobelna & Marchiszewska, 2013).

20

Further, Kiliç and Selim (2009) posit that physical, chemical and biological risk factors have

an adverse effect on job satisfaction, wherein satisfaction decreases with an increase in

occupational health risks. In addition to these physiological stressors of physical demands,

and biological and chemical risks, room attendants were victims of psychological stressors.

Psychological stress has already been identified as an occupational hazard for hotel room

attendants (Faulkner & Patiar, 1997). This stress is believed to be derived from hierarchical

organizational structures (Kensbock et al., 2013a); from treatment of employees as

‘instruments of labour’ in monotonous, repetitive work (Herod & Aguiar, 2006); and from

the demands of guests and role conflict (Kensbock et al., 2013b); Further, psychological

stress is caused from work deemed to be of low social status (Creed & Muller, 2006;

Faulkner & Patiar, 1997). Other damaging hazards potentially facing room attendants include

violence and sexual harassment (Kensbock et al., 2014). Such physical and psychological

stressors impact on both room attendants’ personal lives and performance at work. The

remaining sections in this paper present the categories of tasking related to room attendants’

views of the time hotels’ allocated for cleaning the rooms and their endeavours to achieve

service quality.

Time Pressure

Time pressures were described by room attendants as ‘stretched’, ‘tight’ and ‘difficult’. The

average allocation of 16 rooms a day allowed an average of 28.12 minutes per room, without

considering activities, such as preparation of trolleys, pushing trolleys between rooms, more

21

than usually messy rooms, and delays caused by guests who still occupied rooms. Time

pressure was identified as so intense that even a few minutes was important, as Pamela, in her

30s, explained:

The workload, the amount of rooms we have to get done and the work we are expected

to do daily, you don’t have time.

As already noted, the number of rooms the attendants were required to clean varied between

hotels, with an average of 16 rooms per day. Allowing insufficient time to clean each room

placed enormous demands on hotel room attendants’ physical tasking performance by

requiring faster movements. Bronwyn, in her 40s, explains the difficulty of minimal room

time allocation:

A room attendant is given half an hour to do one checkout, but to do a proper job, the

way they want it done, is probably 40 to 45 minutes, it’s a real challenge.

Room cleaning time-minimization can save several thousands of dollars in labour costs over

months. This has the potential to increase surplus value for hotels and adds to further

exploitation of room attendants through increased appropriation of their efforts. The extent of

time pressure experienced by room attendants was also dependent on the number of

departures as well as the requirement for some rooms to be ready at an earlier time. Eva, in

her 20s, described the problem she found with front office failing to recognize the importance

of timing in her tasks:

If they have been cleaned they can check them in early, like guests check out at eleven

o’clock and yet people don’t get out until 11.30 or 12, and you got to constantly

reschedule your rooms, it’s frustrating.

22

Despite guest departure lists from front office that inform the housekeeping department of

vacated rooms, many guests remained in their rooms for some time after paying their

account. A further consequence of this time pressure is that the room attendants cannot afford

to lose even a few minutes talking to guests. Wendy, in her 40s, explained the dilemma:

I greet the guests, say ‘good morning’, but I can’t talk because it takes three, four,

five minutes and then I get behind.

Room attendants were torn between completing their tasks and fulfilling hotel requirements

that they should interact with guests with empathy. Valerie, in her 50s, revealed that in order

to meet allocated schedules, room attendants were exposed to further exploitation by virtue of

the fact that they had to forgo rest entitlements:

If you take time for smoko [short break, such as morning or afternoon tea/coffee] it

takes you five minutes to get in and get out, and that’s why some girls don’t take their

smoko because you can’t waste 10 minutes getting to and from the staff canteen.

The perceived inability to take legally designated breaks underlined the level of exploitation

of these women. The hotels’ appropriation of every minute of room attendants’ employment

time did not allow sufficient rest time from the intense physical demands. The time pressures,

combined with the workload and the desire to complete the task to meet quality standards,

resulted in some room attendants working in their own time. A key to performance is the

organization of time, and for room attendants there was a trade-off between speed and

meeting the prescribed service quality standards. Effective deployment of labour translates to

less overstaffing and more understaffing. However, the lean staffing, evident at the

participating hotels, can lead to poor performance of service quality (Scherzer et al., 2005)

and is an external constraint imposed on room attendants by their own company’s rules and

procedures. Amongst the five participating hotels, there were no discernible differences in

23

working conditions or intensity, and, as noted in other studies, missing breaks or

“undertaking unpaid work at the end of a shift was not uncommon” and, importantly, is

illegal (Lloyd et al., 2013, 266). In sum, tasking exposes room attendants to a range of health

and safety issues. The following section identifies how room attendants achieve service

quality given the aforementioned impediments.

Achieving Service Quality

To deliver service quality and hence meet and exceed guest expectations, the room

attendants’ aspired to be quality performers within the luxurious five-star hotels by taking

pride in their job. From the participating room attendants’ perspective, as portrayed in the

preceding text, hard, physical workloads and time pressures hindered the achievement of

‘service quality’. That being said, the pursuit of service quality provided room attendants

with task satisfaction as Rachel, in her 40s, disclosed:

It’s a thrill to see the room gleaming and I can’t leave until it is like that.

In attempting to complete tasking thoroughly, room attendants demonstrate a strong work

ethic to meet service quality standards. Unrealistic management demands in time allocation

for room servicing, resulted in room attendants in some instances having to ‘cut corners’ in

order to meet room cleaning-time. The demand for speed means “quality is likely to fall

before speed, because poor quality can be concealed but not slow service” (Goffman, 1959,

p.39). By not allowing sufficient time for room attendants to fulfil correct standards for

tasking, room attendants’ workload was unacknowledged, and this affected the hotels’

service quality. According to participants, service quality equated to providing the expected

24

standards for guests. Maureen, in her 30s, explained her view of achieving quality despite a

request for an early check-in:

If the guest is at reception they just wait until I’m through, because I don’t want them

to walk in and see something that should have been done, and because I was rushing I

missed something and they complain. I’d rather they wait a little longer until I get the

room immaculate.

Maureen’s and others’ perspectives show room attendants believe that guest satisfaction was

a prime gauge of service quality. Nevertheless, the time pressures imposed on room

attendants allowed little time for ‘fixing’ defects and highlighted the need to achieve quality

through ‘doing the right thing first time and aiming for zero defects’, a tenet of TQM

(Crosby, 1996).

The participating room attendants’ statements revealed efforts to meet two dimensions of

quality identified by Parasuraman et al.’s (1988) original proposition of the SERVQUAL

(now called the customer satisfaction expectancy disconfirmation and performance) model.

The two dimensions were reliability in performance of expected service, and demonstrably

meeting the guests’ expectations of a visually appealing room as a tangible offering. Not

having a clean room has been noted as the most serious failure of service quality in hotels

(Lloyd et al., 2013). Hotel room attendants are workers, who are central to a guest’s

experience of service quality.

Discussion

25

Tasking is an inductively derived substantive theory explaining hotel room attendants’

operational functions. The room attendants believed their efforts to achieve quality service

lacked acknowledgement by management, specifically with regard to the physical effort

required and time constraints. Based on Kirsten, Alison and Rachael’s perceptions and shared

by others, room attendants were exploited within the three most physically challenging tasks

identified as: making 26 to 32 king-sized beds daily, moving around the supply trolley in the

course of daily work, and bathroom cleaning. The physical feasibility of accomplishing all

tasking within time limits was affected by the allocation of rooms per shift, the availability of

the rooms, and the condition of vacated rooms. Exploitation was revealed by high injury rates

and psychological stresses exacerbated by room attendants’ experiences as ‘instruments of

labour’ by the physical demands Valerie identified. Luxury hotels have been identified as

having the highest female workplace injury rates in Australia (United Voice, 2011). Nearly

fifty years ago, the task of bed-making was identified as particularly challenging for the

physiological capacities of room attendants in the workplace (Larkin, 1969). Nowadays room

attendants make super king-sized beds, which incur even greater body stresses. Research

shows that room attendants have a very high rate of musculoskeletal injuries (Milburn &

Barrett, 1999).

The fears of Gwen relating to ‘dirty’ tasks are supported by studies identifying hotel

bathroom cleaning as exposing room attendants to pathogenic bacteria, as well as the

potential dangers from incorrect chemical use (Seifert & Messing, 2006). Valerie’s

description of her physical state at the end of the day reveal the excessive demands of hard

work led to burnout, defined as becoming “exhausted by making excessive demands on

energy, strength, or resources” (Fichter & Cipolla, 2010, p.159). Despite a range of literature

identifying the physical hazards of hotel room attendants’ tasks, there appears, judging by the

26

empirical material we collected, to have been little change in practice over time. The room

attendants’ experiences of time pressure identified by Pamela and Bronwyn above accord

with the findings of Faulkner and Patiar’s (1997) study of workplace induced stress amongst

Australian hotel operational staff. The unavailability of rooms inhibits the reliability and

responsiveness quality criteria identified by Parasuraman et al., (1985). The lack of time that

room attendants had for guest interaction, as related by Wendy, has been identified as a

component of negative customer satisfaction, which can be detrimental to a hotel’s image.

The hotel industry appears to take advantage of room attendants for their own profit and these

productive workers need to be in a position to appropriate the surplus value they create

(Burczak, 2012). The intangibility and immediacy of service work complicates the

management of service quality, and this is compounded by demands of efficiency and costs

(Arvelo-Pérez, Arbelo & Pérez-Gómez, 2017). So what appears to be effective and

functional at the strategic level may not appear so to the operational level and particularly in

the delivery of service quality (Bolton & Houlihan, 2010). The failure by hotel management

to acknowledge the time pressures placed on room attendants reified their exploitation

through not correcting these concerns.

Conclusion

This paper presents a simple model of tasking, a substantive theory, where room attendants’

reveal a holistic experience of their job responsibilities. The consequence of the exploitative

hard work, identified in this paper, was women who were physically and mentally drained

and not fully recognized through the hotels’ lack of acknowledgement of their workload and

paid minimum wages. Service quality was seriously compromised by room attendants’

27

workload. Under the current management of these hotels the focus is on ‘scientific’

management concepts of economic efficiency and cost cutting. To meet the challenge of

service quality the room attendants appeared to have insufficient recourse to their physical

exhaustion.

Theoretical and practical implications

As noted at the beginning of this article, our research contributes to hospitality literature

firstly by using an intertwined socialist feminist-critical theory epistemology and grounded

theory methodology. This approach provides a perspective not offered in previous studies by

theory building from the room attendants’ empirical world experiences, and thus fills a gap in

extant literature. Secondly, the insights of room attendants are grounded in the succinct

model of tasking and gives hotel room attendants a ‘voice’ to explain their perspectives of

their daily duties. The women room attendants’ concerns include working under physical

duress with tight time restrictions, which have a detrimental effect on the delivery of service

quality for guests. The perspectives of room attendants revealed herein provide insights for

hotel operational praxis, particularly, acknowledgement of room attendants as a community

of value in decision-making, and in moving towards a reduction in workload expectations

prevalent under current management styles to ensure service quality delivery. This may be

achieved through a psychological capital approach to develop constructs such as hope,

optimism, resilience and self-efficacy (Mathe, Scott-Halsell, Kim & Krawczyk, 2017).

Limitations and future research

28

Finally, this study has only provided in-depth insights into women room attendants’

employment experiences concerning workload in five ‘five-star’ hotels on the Gold Coast,

Queensland, Australia in the early decades of the 21st century. In light of this research, further

research directions are recommended using broader samples across all hotel ‘star’ ratings to

provide a deeper representation of room attendant occupations in relation to their workload

and remuneration. Given the nature of hard work performed by hotel room attendants the

following questions require further examination:

1. How can hotel management positively change the workload for room attendants

within everyday hotel operational settings?

2. How can room attendants be recognized as communities of value with regard

decision-making and their working conditions, for example, in the choice of chemicals for

cleaning?

3. How can hotel room attendants receive matched time workloads commensurate to

task performance and quality assurance?

In answering these questions from varying stakeholders views, researchers will be able to

both further refine the substantive theory of ‘tasking’ as well as to provide strategies that

address the concerns of room attendants’ experiences of exploitation through overwork,

which affects their ability to deliver service quality to guests.

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Figure 1. Conceptual model of tasking